The Register is running a story today about how cybercrime has become more lucrative than drugs. That sounded like an astonishing factoid, and completely blew me away... and then I read the footnote. Apparently, they are counting copyright violations and the costs of malware in that number - accounting for well over 75 percent of the cited "losses", these numbers are grossly eggagerated by the industry at large.
First of all, most copyright loss stastics start from the premise that everyone who uses a piece of pirated software is "lost revenue" - in other words, that they would have bought the software if they weren't pirating it. The same with music, movies, and so on. That just isn't the case. I know quite a few people with pirated copies of Acrobat - a 175 dollar value. I seriously doubt that the majority of these folks would have anted up a buck seventy-five for a legit copy of it if they didn't get it from a friend on the sly. I think the same is true of music - if a person dowloads Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me" because it's stuck in their head, does that mean the record company is missing out on an album sale? Would these folks otherwise have leapt into their cars for a wild ride to Sam Goody if they couldn't sit comfortably in their underwear and download it over eMule? According to these stastics, the answer is yes. I disagree.
Secondly, although I am not going to argue against the statement that malware is a problem (and an expensive one), the dollar loss values cited by industry at large often take into account numerous "intangables" that may or may not be realistic. For example, I used to work for a firm that included "lost resources" (the time spent by personnel to fix the virus) for salaried employees. Now, nobody likes to work late, but salaried employees don't cost you more if they stay overtime. Sometimes the loss stastics include software costs for AV. No matter how you slice it, they are almost always eggagerated.
Anyway, props to The Register for putting the footnote in, but jeers to the folks who put these misleading statistics together.
Posted by Ed at November 29, 2005 08:04 AM